‘I was Blown Away by Last Film Show’: Mark Osborne

Mark Osborne is best known as the filmmaker who co-directed the very first instalment of Kung Fu Panda, a movie that got an Oscar nomination in the Best Animated Feature category. He also has another Oscar nomination for his 1998 short film, More. But the filmmaker is in India to talk about the film closest to his heart – the 2015 adaptation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s iconic book, The Little Prince – at the 53rd International Film Festival of India (IFFI), being held in Goa. The director, who had collaborated with BAFTA-winning and Oscar-nominated producer Jinko Gotoh on the hybrid stop-motion/CG film, is currently working on two more projects with her including Escape From Hat written by Adam Kline. We caught up with the filmmaker when the duo dropped by the Rolling Stone India office recently. Excerpts:

What brings you to India?

I am here for many reasons, one being to talk about a film that I have made and love, called The Little Prince, at IFFI. I am also here to explore the prospects of my next project that we are in the middle of making. We had found some creative partners to develop it and adapt it for today’s audience. We are halfway into it and are now looking for new creative partners who will embrace this passion project of ours and join us in our journey to turn this beautiful script into a movie.

Do you have any idea about the Indian film industry?

I am not an expert but recently I watched the movie that has been submitted for the Oscars, Last Film Show. I was absolutely blown away. It is an extraordinary film and it told me a lot about the impact of cinema on Indian culture and how important a part it plays in the society. But I have to watch a lot more. I also watched RRR. That popped up on Netflix and I had no idea what we were about to experience. My wife and I watched it and we could not believe our eyes. We had to actually go and watch it in the movie theatre a second time! The imagery was just mind-blowing.

RRR was in fact also in the running for the Oscar nomination this year. But eventually, Last Film Show got selected as the official entry. What is your take on the Oscar prospects of the two?

Sometimes films are Oscar baits and sometimes those are the worst. I think the attempt now is to bring films that are popular and not just art films. The films that stay with me are the movies that live beyond the opening weekend and award seasons.

As a voter and an Academy member, I would expect that both would become part of the conversation. I was so moved by Last Film Show. I was not expecting the experience at all. It was quite stunning. I am yet to get the cultural specificity of RRR. I need a deeper understanding of where the film came from and how it emerged. But it hit me like a popcorn movie, and it hit me hard! It made me sit up and realize that I need to watch more Indian movies, and I need to start right away!

Tell us about your new project?

It has live action and animation. It is about healing, about kindness. It is a movie that has evolved through the pandemic and it has the power to make you feel that everything will eventually be okay. What is broken can be fixed. It is a film the world needs today.

Kung Fu Panda was produced by DreamWorks Animation and distributed by Paramount Pictures, while The Little Prince was distributed by Paramount Pictures and later picked up by Netflix. Why did you choose the independent route for your new project?

I started as an indie filmmaker, and I know the freedom it brings to preserve the creative. Sometimes when you have outside forces, the studios, taking charge, it might be a smart way but not always the best way to bring the story that you want to tell to the audience. Great work needs to be nurtured, you can’t just manufacture it. Sometimes a film’s value is determined by how much it makes in the opening weekend. But it is the long-term potential of a creative project that interests me. If the storytelling is powerful, it will eventually find an audience, and it will create that connect.

With studios and even with streaming platforms, they go through regime changes. What needs to get made is determined by the person at the top and his idea of what the audience needs. It is about who is interpreting the data, and what data is getting interpreted. Streaming platforms have a lot of data on what is being watched and they have various different ways to interpret those. The hope is the focus will eventually shift from interpreting data to empowering creators to tell stories they care about. That will create long-term growth. But unfortunately, it is the short-term growth this is usually the determining factor for the studios as well as the streaming platforms.  

With technology evolving, the animation industry has become more democratic. Has it gotten any easier to mount independent projects?

I think today there are so many different ways to approach financing a movie, putting a movie together, and packaging it. In fact, we have been talking about putting together a company called Kinship that would help find ways and means to tell stories the world needs in a more authentic way, in ways they need to be told but might not necessarily fill the boxes on the spreadsheets of the big studios. It is [about] finding those partnerships, finding those people who appreciate doing things in a different way, and giving the audience fresh and unexpected stories. The intention is to try to give the audience what they don’t even know they want. That is how Kung Fu Panda also happened. It was not something the audience had seen before.

Tell us something about The Little Prince and your approach to adapting this popular book.

It has been adapted multiple times. When I was asked if I wanted to make an animated adaptation of the book, at first I said no. The book is essentially a poem, it is beautiful and it takes you on a journey. I wasn’t sure how to capture that individual journey that every reader goes through while reading the book. Then I thought why not focus on a character that reads the book and goes through that personal journey that eventually changes the life of this character? So, that became my way to figuring out how I can pay tribute to the book that was such a powerful force in my own life, while celebrating it.

Kung Fu Panda and The Little Prince, although both animated features, reflect two rather different styles of filmmaking. How do you explain this?

I fell in love with movies while watching different kinds of films. I fell in love with the idea of telling stories through cinema. I didn’t fall in love with any particular medium. Although I do have an affection for stop-motion animation, I wanted to explore all mediums to tell stories. So, SpongeBob is entirely different from Kung Fu Panda, and both these movies are very different from The Little Prince in terms of the animation – the aim is to find the best medium suited to tell that particular story.

When I joined Kung Fu Panda, I had neither made a movie using computer animation nor had I ever made a martial arts movie. I looked at it as an opportunity to explore different tools and styles of storytelling. I never expected to be part of such a project or even to stay on the project till the very end, but the moment we wrapped up the film, I wanted to try out other things and started pursuing other projects. When The Little Prince was brought to me, I couldn’t say no. I have so much love for the book and the part it played in my life… my wife had gifted me this book when we had first started dating in college. So, I tried to figure out a way to tell the story using animation, but I didn’t want to stick to just one particular medium of animation. So, I incorporated 2-D animation, stop-motion animation, and CG animation as ways to bring out the story.

Even in the beginning of developing The Little Prince, I was working on developing a very different project that became a movie called the Sausage Party; it is an R-rated Seth Rogan comedy that is ludicrous. So, yeah, I have worked on projects which are markedly different from one another. I have a very strange resume but if you follow my work, especially my personal projects and shorts, you might see a pattern emerge.

But do you ever see yourself making another Kung Fu Panda movie? It has since become a huge franchise.

I have already done it and it would be tough to come up with something that would top it. I was not in any way involved with the second or the third one, and I hear they are making a fourth one. I don’t know if I would want to get back to it. But then, never say never!